By 
14-11-2025
Giulia Villa
Europe Team Researcher,
Global Human Rights Defence.
On November 5th, through a joint statement, 250 organisations called on the European Union (EU) to reject and halt the work on the new Deportation Regulation, proposed in March 2025. The new law aims to replace the 2008 Return Directive and tighten current immigration control measures, but it could prove to be a dangerous shift driven by the political imperative to boost deportation rates by prioritising detention, and surveillance. The 250 organisations, including Amnesty International and Avocats Sans Frontières (ASF), are calling for the immediate withdrawal of the proposal and its rejection by the European Parliament and the Council of the EU.
Through the increase in cases of ‘lack of cooperation’, together with the tightening of coercive and detention measures, there is a high risk of removing essential appeal rights and procedural safeguards. The restriction of access to justice and to an effective remedy would have the sole result of pushing migrants into situations of irregularity and legal limbo, also due to the obligation to issue deportation orders without considering other possibilities such as family reunification (Art. 7, 14).
Among the most criticised proposals is the possibility of creating offshore detention centres outside EU territory and promoting the surveillance of migrant communities through racial profiling and data sharing. Articles 4 and 17 of the proposal would, in fact, for the first time, allow the deportation of a migrant to a non-European country against their will, separating families and communities and worsening the situation with the risk that individuals remain trapped in third countries, far from paths of inclusion and reintegration. Furthermore, the introduction of return hubs would risk creating detention centres that violate international law through automatic arbitrary detention, direct and indirect pushbacks. According to Article 6, the proposal would require states to introduce surveillance systems to detect irregular migrants, leading to an increase in racial profiling and discriminatory treatment. Instead of helping to address a widespread problem in the EU, such as racial profiling, this kind of proposal would further expand the use of these racist policing practices.
The new proposal is yet another part of a worrying trend in the EU’s migration regulation, which increasingly acts as rhetoric for a security vision based on restriction, framing migration as a serious threat and expanding the use of detention as allowed by Articles 29–35 of the proposal. This kind of regulation not only fails to address the real structural issues related to inclusion, by investing instead in punitive control mechanisms, but also risks seriously eroding fundamental rights.
Therefore, the proposal, which will be discussed during the month of November in the European Parliament, represents an alarming step toward a more restrictive migration policy but also continues to place at the centre of the debate solutions based on a coercive and dehumanising concept of security.
